teach thee humility-to bring thee to known thyself and the limits of thy strength. Look to the heavens, and admire their beautiful order; but learn, too, that the stars in their courses know not thy control. Look upon thyself, observe the strange complications of thy manifold nature, sway thy scepter too over the powers and elements of nature around thee; yet learn, that when thy trial comes, and the blast falls upon thee, thy power is helplessness; and let all this train thy soul to acknowledge in me thy wisdom and thy strength." And yet the vain creature presumes to think, that he can fix the limits of the Divine action, when his knowledge and his power are alike as nothingness. - But we call Nature herself to witness that her sequences have been frequently interfered with -that new productions have come forth, and new laws and processes have been called into being. Ask the geologist what witnesses he has found in the rocks, and he will tell you, that he has gone down in his search to the foundations of the earth, where the igneous rocks have warned him that he had reached primeval creation; and in his upward journey he has met with mosses, and ferns, and palms, and higher vegetable productions; each of which, as standing at the head of a species, he is bound to regard as having been brought into existence separately and independently, Ascending higher still, he has discovered various forms of animal life, higher and lower; and he confesses, that he knew no other rational and scientific way of accounting for their existence, than that of a new creation-the action of a power above nature bringing them into nature. Ask him, if "development" is not equal to the production of these forms? and if he is a man of science, (not a sciolist,) he will tell you, that he knows not the voice of this stranger; that some of his weaker brethren have gone after him, and have been led into sad follies; but that in all his scientific observations he has never known the occurrence of the transition from one of these forms of life to another, he has never witnessed the operation, and the earth has disclosed to him no case in which it was progressing or performed. He will tell you, that this same development is an unblushing intruder into the domain of science, unlicensed and unrecognized. Such is the united voice of all the most eminent in geology and its kindred sciences; and if these new formations exist, and if no known powers or laws with which science deals can offer or suggest a cause of their existence, what remains but that we refer them to the action of a power above nature, bringing them into existence at a fitting time for the accomplishment of their purpose in its system? * (TO BE CONCLUDED IN NEXT NUMBER.) * Let us hear a word, on the subject of development, from one who himself has won scientific laurels. "All the great living and recently deceased masters of physical science reject it. Does it appeal to anatomy and physiology? Cuvier, Owen, and Carpenter cry out against it. Does it evoke the aid of chemistry? Berzelius, Turner, and Liebig see its shallowness. Does it call on zoology for aid? Agassiz and Ehrenberg can refute its claims. Does it search the archives of geD'Orbigny can show how certainly they will fail ology for support? Sedgwick, Miller, Lyell, and there. Or, finally, does it appeal to botany? Hooker and Lindley, Torrey and Gray, know that it will certainly glean nothing to sustain it in that flowery field. The fact is, it is only here and there that a second-rate naturalist will sympathize at all with such dreamy views."- Dr. E. Hitchcock in Bibliotheca Sacra, vol. xi. p. 789. 1854. THE Emperor Napoleon lately purchased a very beautiful mountain dog. The owner of the animal asked one hundred and fifty francs for it. "Five hundred francs," said his Majesty, handing the money to the astonished peasant; "bring the dog to my house." The most amusing part of the affair is, that the man, who had never seen the Emperor, spoke to him without even raising his hat. When he found out to whom he had been speaking, he said: "O Sire! pray excuse me for having called you Monsieur." It is mentioned as a discovery that the secretary of Mary Queen of Scots, Sir George Bailey, is buried in a small cemetery, at La Hulpe, near Brussels. He was born in the same year as the Queen, whose execution he witnessed, and had reached the advanced age of eighty-four when he died. From Fraser's Magazine. HALLUCINATIONS AND VISIONS.* M. BRIERRE DE BOISMONT is well There are three words in common use known in England as a physician of large among the learned in disorders of the experience among the insane, and as an mind-illusion, delusion, and hallucinaauthor of mark on many subjects co- tion; and it would greatly conduce to nected with the physiology and pathology clearness and precision in the treatment of the mind. He is also favorably dis- of a subject in which these qualities are tinguished from most of his countrymen specially required, if we could arrive at by the pains he has taken to make him- some distinct understanding respecting self acquainted with the labors of his co- these terms. Now, there should be temporaries on this side the Channel, with no doubt or difficulty about the two some of whom he is on terms of intimacy. words illusion and delusion. Illusion The latest production of his pen is now certainly should mean a false sensation, before us in an English dress. The work and delusion a false idea. The one (illuof translation has been faithfully performed sion) is an error of the senses, in which by Mr. Hulme, who has also succeeded in the mind, if sound, has no part; the other condensing a work of which the chief de- (delusion) an error of the mind, in which fect was diffuseness and repetition, with- it is not necessary that the senses should out impairing its value as an exponent of participate. But the word hallucination, a very interesting and important subject. though perhaps used in France with the The intellectual repast provided for us requisite precision, has not met with such by the author consists of nearly one hun- judicious treatment in England. Among dred and fifty cases selected from the best scientific writers it is sometimes used as authorities, French, German, and English, synonymous with illusion, sometimes with arranged in order, and serving as illus- delusion. Our older writers, too, both trations of the principles laid down in the classical and medical, employed the word early chapters of his work. The cases in different senses. Addison, for instance, themselves, apart from the running com- says, of a mere typographical error, "This mentary which connects them, and serves must have been the hallucination of the to enhance their value, would prove full transcriber, who probably mistook the of interest for the intelligent student; dash of the i for a t" and Byrom tells but when taken with the judicious re-us of "some poor hallucinating scribe's marks of M. de Boismont, they will be found to combine the charms of authentic fact, lucid arrangement, and sound philosophy. Before we proceed to place the author's labors under contribution for the edification of our readers, we must indulge ourselves in a brief dissertation on the meaning of the word hallucination. The discussions which took place on the occasion of the trial of Buranelli, respecting the meaning which ought to attach to the cognate words illusion and delusion must serve as our apology for the slight delay involved in this our verbal criticism. * On Hallucinations: a History and Explanation of Apparitions, Visions, Dreams, Ecstasy, Magnetism, and Somnambulism. By A. BRIERRE DE BOISMONT, M.D. Translated from the French by ROBERT T. 1859. mistake." Boyle, too, speaks of "a few hallucinations about a subject to which the greatest clerks have been generally such strangers." In the first two passages the word is used somewhat in the sense of an illusion, but in the third in the sense of a delusion. The two great physicians, Sir Thomas Browne and Harvey, evidently use the word in opposite senses; for Sir Thomas Browne, discoursing upon the sight, says: "If vision be abolished, it is called cæcitas or blindness; if depraved, and receive its objects erroneously, hallucination." But Harvey, speaking of "a wasting of the flesh without cause," tells us that it "is frequently termed a bewitched disease; but questionless a mere hallucination of the vulgar." So that Harvey used the word in the sense of an error of the mind, Browne as an error of the sense of sight. As, however, the learned author of Vulgar Errors is defining the word, while Harvey uses it without any special weighing of its meaning-as two out of the three other authorities just quoted employ it in the sense which Sir Thomas Browne attaches to it, and most modern writers give it the same meaning-we will take an hallucination to be a depraved or erroneous action of the senses. If we are justified in so defining the word hallucination, we are perhaps equally justified in urging our psychologists to abandon the use of the term in favor of the more simple word illusion. But we are afraid that M. Brierre de Boismont would not support us in this attempt at simplification, for he employs the word illusion in contradistinction to the word hallucination, defining a hallucination as "the perception of the sensible signs of an idea," and an illusion "as the false appreciation of real sensations." We, on the contrary, are disposed to make the word illusion do double duty, and to release the word hallucination from all its engagements. Defining an illusion as an error of sense, we should recognize two kinds of illusion, the one consisting in the falsification of real, the other in the creation of unreal, sensations. Thus a gentleman who, fresh from turtle-soup, punch, venison, and champagne, should contrive to convert a combination of lantern, turnip, broomstick, and sheet into a ghost, would be afflicted with the first form of illusion; while another gentleman who, under similar convivial influences, should succeed in manufacturing a ghost out of the unsubstantial air of a bleak common, with no object visible for miles, would be the subject of the second form of illusion. But the question whether we shall or shall not accept our author's definition of hallucinations and illusions must not be allowed to divert us any longer from the more important contents of his work. We shall be turning these to the best account if we attempt with his assistance, to give our own connected and continuous view of all that part of the large science of psychology which relates to the senses in their healthy and in their disordered con ditions. A man possessed of a sound mind in a healthy body, endowed with organs of sense of perfect construction, and keeping in all things within the bounds of temperance and moderation, would be absolutely free from illusions and hallucinations. His eye would present to him none but real sights, his ear would convey to him only real sounds. His sleep would not be disturbed by dreams. The only sensations not exactly corresponding to external objects which he would experience would consist in the substitution of the complementary colors for each other if he fatigued the eye by fixing it too long on some bright object. The golden sun would appear to his closed eyes like a violet colored wafer, a window - frame would seem to have dark panes and light sashes, and a dark picture with a gilt frame would have its light and dark features transposed. The perfect physical organization which we have just supposed would also be quite compatible with the hearing of sounds and the seeing of sights which can only be traced to their true source by the light of science or experience. A person thus happily endowed might judge wrongly of an echo or be misled by a mirage. He might be frightened by the Giant of the Brocken or enchanted by the castles of the Fairy Morgana. His sensations would be real, though the cause might be indirect or obscure. The next onward step in the philosophy of the organs of sense is taken if, for the healthy man, we substitute the ailing child or less vigorous adult, on whose organs of sense sensations linger after the cause of them have been removed. Our author quotes from Abercrombie one case in which the eye was the seat of such a persistent sensation; and he might have drawn from the same source another in which the sense of hearing was similarly affected. A friend of the Doctor had been for some time looking intently at a small print of the Virgin and Child. On raising his head, the two figures the size of life appeared at the end of the room, and continued visible for the space of two minutes. From persistent sensations, or sensa tions reproduced involuntarily after a short interval, the transition is easy and natural to sensations prolonged or reproduced by an effort of the will. The power of bringing back the pictures of visible objects in the dark, or of restoring sounds in the silence, does not seem to be a very rare one. Many children possess it, and there are artists who are able to turn it to account. The painter whom Dr. Wigan If we again assume as possible a perfectly healthy and perfectly temperate man, we can imagine such a man to be absolutely free from hallucinations, for we can imagine him free from dreams; but the vast majority of men have large experience of hallucinations as they occur in that imperfect sleep which favors the free play of the fancy. In this state we know that every sense may become in its turn the theater of impressions that are not distinguishable from those which external objects occasion in the waking man; and these illusions of the senses are blended with delusions of the mind that rival them in vividness and reality. represents as executing three hundred | It is to this involuntary work of the brain portraits in one year possessed this faculty that we would now invite the attention of of reproduction in an eminent degree. the reader. He placed each of a succession of sitters before him for half an hour, and looked at him attentively, sketching from time to time on the canvas. Having dismissed his last sitter, he began to paint the first of the series after a method described in these words: "I took the man and sat him in the chair, where I saw him as distinctly as if he had been before me in his own proper person; I may almost say more vividly. I looked from time to time at the imaginary figure, then worked with my pencil, then referred to the countenance, and so on, just as I should have done had the sitter been there. When I looked at the chair I saw the man." This painter won distinction, and earned and Here let us pause a moment while we saved money, but he spent thirty years of contemplate this wonderful phenomenon his life in a madhouse. On his release his of dreams - this strange compound of right hand was found not to have lost its illusions and delusions this harmless cunning; but the exercise of his art ex- analogue of madness—this most instruccited him too much; he gave up his paint-tive and most humanizing plea for dealing ing, and died soon after. Another step forward, and we come to the case of the child who covers himself with the bed-clothes and paints his miniature fancy scenes on his organ of vision: or of the poet who contrives, as Goethe did, to see what he fervently imagines; or of the actor Talma, who asserted of himself that he was in the habit of stripping his brilliant audiences of all covering, artificial and natural, till he left only bare skeletons behind, and that under the influence of the emotions excited by this strange spectral assembly he produced some of his most startling effects. cautiously and tenderly with the sorest trial and affliction of humanity. Fatigued by bodily labor, wearied by mental applition, or tired of doing nothing, we escape from the discomfort of clothes, place ourselves in a position of rest, do our best to banish thought, shut out, if we can, both light and sound, and so fall asleep. There we lie, given up to the chemical changes and automatic movements of nutrition, circulation, and respiration, the pulse and breathing reduced to their lowest number, and every function of the frame to its lowest point of activity. Of the proximate cause of this state we know nothing, and the best guess we can make at it is that the balance of the circulation through the brain has been altered, and that whereas in our waking state the vessels conveying red blood to the head were kept filled by the more vigorous action of the heart, Sensation without the immediate pre- and the vessels conveying black blood sence of an object of sense is assuredly a from the head were comparatively empty, very wonderful phenomenon; but the in our sleeping state the order of things seeing and hearing, the feeling, smelling, is reversed, and the black blood predomiand tasting, of objects which have no ex-nates over the red. Be this as it may, a istence, as the result of an involuntary operation of the brain, without any cooperation of the senses, (for illusions have been shown to occur after the entire destruction of the organs of sense of which they might be supposed the scene,) are among the most extraordinary facts of our complicated and marvelous organization. Such then, without making any pretense to minute accuracy, are the most familiar facts relating to the reproduction of sensations or their voluntary creation in the absence of the objects which usually occasion them. perfectly healthy change in the functions of the brain, and one not involving any permanent alteration in its structure, is found by universal experience to be accompanied by illusions of all the senses, and strange delusions of the mind, the illusions and delusions being mixed up into scenes as apparently real as the mix ture of sensations, thoughts, and actions, which make up the transactions of our waking hours. When these curious compounds of illusion and delusion are brought about by very slight departures from ideal perfect health, or when they occur during the short transition from sound sleep to perfect wakefulness, and are not attended by any painful sensation of oppression, suffocation, sinking, or struggling, we call them dreams; but if that single straw berry, or that modicum of pie-crust which we were so imprudent as to blend with that otherwise moderate and wholesome supper, should happen to disagree with us, and the indigestion which reveals itself to our waking man by too familiar symptoms in stomach and brain, in mind and temper, plants a cat, a dog, or a demon upon our chests, raises us to giddy hights, plunges us to awful depths, sends us spinning like a top, or, more merciful, lends us wings to fly, or sevenleague boots to clear oceans at a leap, then our dreams become nightmares, and we have opened out for contemplation the myriads of hallucinations which grow out of uneasy bodily sensations misinterpreted by a mind robbed by sleep of all its usual standards of comparison. bulism, and other analogous conditions fruitful in hallucinations, we pass on to abstinence, voluntary or enforced, to solitude and imprisonment, and to the complicated fatigues and privations of shipwreck. Judging by the examples cited by the author, these causes generally, but not invariably, produce hallucinations of an agreeable kind; in which respect they resemble the sensations described by those who have been rescued from drowning and hanging. The shipwrecked crew on the raft of the Medusa, deserted and starving, saw not only the vessels which they hoped for, but beautiful plantations and avenues, and landscapes leading to magnificent cities; and the miner shut up during fifteen days without food is comforted by celestial voices, as was Benvenuto Cellini in his prison, and, if our memory serves us faithfully, Silvio Pellico. Hallucinations of a less pleasurable kind are not uncommon in aged persons, as the result of failing strength and languid circulation through the brain. A Following still an order of our own, but availing ourselves freely of our author's illustrative examples, we next arrive at those hallucinations which are caused by poisonous substances, such as the stramonium or thorn-apple, and the belladonna or deadly night-shade. case of suicidal poisoning by the first of these plants came under the author's notice. It occurred in the person of a musician and composer, who was first giddy, then as if drunk with wine, next entangled in a visionary ballet, then insensible, then again surrounded by hundreds of thieves and assassins with hideous faces and threatening gestures, which so frightened and excited him that when taken to the Hôtel Dieu he was confined as a furious madman. In three days he had completely recovered. A condensed account of the experiences of the English Opium Eater, with a singular history of an opium-eating Indian king, and a fact from Abercrombie illustrative of the power which opium administered for more legitimate reasons has of creating hallucinations; some interesting experiments with the haschisch, (a preparation made from the seeds of the Cannabis Indica, or Indian hemp ;) and cases of delirium tremens produced by the abuse of spirituous liquors, complete this division of the subject. Of the varieties of nightmare, we have not space to speak at any length. Suffice it to state, that the sleeper sometimes betrays his trouble to the looker-on by restless tossings about, while at other times he appears to be in a sound sleep; that generally he wakes up in a paroxysm of terror struggling hopelessly for breath, for power of speech, or movement; and that, in some few instances, the unreal sensations are for a short space of time believed to be real, to the imminent danger of sleeping neighbors. For some interesting cases of nightmare repeated night after night, (in some instances at the same hour,) and of nightmare attacking a number of persons at the same time, and with the self-same hallucination, the reader is referred to M. Brierre de Boismont. Also for much curious information on dreams, somnambulism, ecstasy, and animal magnetism. We have marked some of the cases cited under the head of dreams as misplaced, but the cases are so interesting in themselves that our criticism is disarmed as we read them. Next in order to the causes of halluFrom dreams, nightmares, somnam-cinations which we have just been consid |